A tribute to Maureen Daly Goggin
It was an honor for me to share the following tribute to Maureen Daly Goggin, who began her career at ASU in 1994 as an assistant professor and, over the course of her career at ASU, has been recognized as an exemplar of faculty excellence. The tribute was initially presented as part of the department’s celebration of retirees on April 14, and it is addressed to Goggin.
Maureen: I am standing in today for your many colleagues here at ASU and in the profession who want to thank you and wish you well, so I hope you and others will indulge me for focusing on how much I personally have valued your work. I first knew you through your scholarship—particularly from reading your book "Authoring a Discipline: Scholarly Journals and the Post-World War II Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition" (Routledge, 2000), an archival research project that informed my own research—and that of many others—in the NCTE and CCCC archives. But it was only a small sampling of your scholarly work, which has included eleven edited collections, 23 journal articles, 36 book chapters, along with 28 keynotes and 92 other conference presentations on a range of topics from material rhetorics to writing program administration.
Though I had met and talked with you at professional conferences, I didn’t really get to know you until I was hired at ASU while you were associate chair. It’s accurate to say that I’m here because of you and your work in the hiring process; as I scan the participants in our meeting today, I see many other faces who are here because you had a big part in their being brought into the Department of English, during your term as associate chair from 2004 to 2009 or your term as chair from 2009 to 2013. Thank you for helping us find an academic home where we could thrive.
You have also made invaluable contributions as a part of the writing, rhetorics, and literacies (WRL) area faculty—formerly rhetoric, composition, and linguistics (RCL)—as a teacher of graduate courses, undergraduate courses for the major, and as a mentor of PhD students. Your hand is evident in the evolution of the PhD in RCL and WRL program especially in the ways the program has responded to changes in the field, in the profession, and in the academic market. Likewise, your work to develop courses for our emerging undergraduate WRL major has helped assure it meets the needs and interests of our students. During your 28 years of contributing to the area, you’ve taught most of our courses at one time or another. Your teaching of the graduate research course has launched the graduate study of most of our WRL students. Over the nearly three decades you’ve devoted to teaching, you chaired 38 dissertations, and I know, as a member of about a dozen of those committees, how thoughtfully and supportively you have mentored students through the process of making their initial contributions to the field.
Your contributions to the profession at large have been equally generous, including serving on the editorial board of five journals, providing manuscript reviews for eighteen journals, and writing reviews for tenure and promotion for 24 rhetoric and writing studies scholars over the course of your career. There are so many other achievements I haven’t mentioned, such as your textbook with Norton—which is in its fifth edition—and your Fulbright scholar grant to the University of Graz.
Your contributions have truly counted: they counted at the time, and they will endure.
So, on behalf of the profession of English studies, thank you, Maureen for your service as an editor, manuscript reviewer, and tenure and promotion reviewer. Your work has advanced the careers of colleagues across the country and the world. On behalf of the discipline of writing studies, thank you, Maureen, for your scholarship and for your mentoring of future generations of writing studies scholars. And on behalf of the Department of English, The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Arizona State University as a whole, thank you, Maureen, for your leadership and service. And a special thanks from those of us who, like me, are here for you today, who know we are here because of your work. Well done.
Image: The author, Shirley Rose (right) co-chaired the 2015 Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference with Maureen Daly Goggin (left), which was hosted at ASU. Photo by Courtney Pedroza/ASU.